Edith Wharton: a magnificent and subtle writer

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Edith Wharton (January 24, 1862- August 11, 1937) won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for The Age of Innocence. She was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature three times. In this article, originally published in 2007, Caroline Moore reviews Edith Wharton by Hermione Lee.

"No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money"; a woman who does so is doubly open to ridicule. As Hermione Lee shows in this excellent biography, the reputation of the novelist Edith Wharton – a magnificently subtle, passionate and constantly surprising writer – has suffered unfairly, merely because she was born near the top of what she called the 'small, slippery pyramid' of society.

She was born in 1862: her father, George, was a Jones. This may not sound distinguished; but, as Edith caustically remarked, in New York the Jones family had "for generations, in a most distinguished way… done nothing whatever remarkable".

Her relations gave rise to the phrase 'keeping up with the Joneses'; but that did nothing to help the aspirations of an un-pretty, unfashionably red-headed little girl who was born to be remarkable. Almost symbolically, Edith's red hair remained defiantly unfaded until her dying day. Her mother, Lucretia, was cold, disapproving and, according to her daughter, distrusted writers with"the sort of diffidence which, thank heaven, no psychoanalyst had yet arisen to call a complex".

Edith, in accordance with the customs of her class, was forbidden to read any novels, until 'the day of my marriage'. Yet, as a child, she was a natural, even compulsive writer, 'making up' incessantly – a solitary, ritualistic, obsessive activity. Her first literary efforts were quelled. Aged 11, she showed her mother a story which began, ' "Oh, how do you, Mrs Brown?" said Mrs Tompkins. "If only I had known you were going to call I should have tidied up the drawing room".' 'Never shall I forget', Edith wrote bitterly, 'the sudden drop of my creative frenzy when she returned it with the icy comment: "Drawing rooms are always tidy." '

Her sheer bossiness became a triumph. Many ladies fancied they 'did' war-work, but Wharton, living in Paris, not only fund-raised for but actually ran numerous large and effective charities for refugees and orphans. She worked day and night, on only five hours sleep: her health never recovered

Wharton's novels are full of inadequate, rigid, demanding, financially feckless, socially aspiring mothers. But Edith, who wrote with such satirical compassion about how women are trapped by their upbringing, inherited her mother's quelling mannerisms. In numerous memoirs she is a figure of fun, an overbearing Lady Bracknell. The publisher who asked how she liked the cover of her first novel met with no average first novelist's diffidence: "Words fail to express how completely I don't like it.'"

She thought the Irish writer George Moore a "bounder": "I had to annihilate him." F Scott Fitzgerald, who turned up drunk to a tea party in 1925, reported himself "squelched" (she remarked that his claim to have been living in a brothel "lacked data").

After a childhood spent in Europe, she was formidably self-educated in French and Italian architecture and art: in her early married life, a rich New England neighbour showed off her house, saying, 'And I call this my Louis Quinze room.' Wharton supposedly replied, 'staring about her through her lorgnette, "Why, my dear?" ' Alas, the story of her attempting to charter a battleship to take her from Paris to England during the war turns out to be apocryphal. Many of the vignettes of Wharton as a domineering 'American duchess' were supplied by her intimate friends.

Her circle included many cultured, often homosexual and sometimes frankly bitchy men, who caricatured her as an iron-willed, steel-winged culture-vulture armed with a powerful motor-car, the dreaded 'Editha Steelpinnata', swooping down on limp victims to carry them off on exhausting sight-seeing trips. Wharton perhaps suffers because her most famous friendship was with Henry James. James – and his disciples, on his behalf – envied Wharton's wealth. 'She mentioned once that the car in which they were riding had been bought with the proceeds of her last novel. "With the proceeds of my last novel," said Henry meditatively, "I purchased a small go-cart, in which my guests' luggage is wheeled from the station … It needs a coat of paint. With the proceeds of my next novel I shall have it painted".'

Edith Wharton in the 1880s, with a dog theme going onCredit:
Rex Features

Her standards must have been galling. Feeling the pinch, after the war, she ran only two 'little' houses in France, one a perfect 18th-century chateau, the other part of a castle in the Riviera, employing between them 22 servants. But Henry James, though often enjoyably malicious about his friends, was never blind to their virtues.

Edith might at times be 'difficult', as he wrote to a new mutual friend, 'but you will never find her stupid, and you will never find her mean'. James would never plumb the true depths of her generosity. When he was disabled by depression, Wharton suspected that it might be triggered by the financial worries. She transferred $8,000 to his publishers, ordering that it should be passed on to James under the guise of a large advance. In the war, her generosity, of spirit as well as of money, was truly heroic.

Her sheer bossiness became a triumph. Many ladies fancied they 'did' war-work, but Wharton, living in Paris, not only fund-raised for but actually ran numerous large and effective charities for refugees and orphans. She worked day and night, on only five hours sleep: her health never recovered. Along with this magnificently domineering, courageous, armour-plated Wharton – who was a war-correspondent from the front and, as an intrepid traveller, grappled with an intruder in a dark bedroom in Tunisia ('he was a small man') – there is a vulnerable side, equally well drawn by Hermione Lee, encompassing the loneliness, yearning, and sense of a 'missed chance' that permeate her fiction.

An early engagement was broken off because (according to the local paper) of 'an alleged preponderance of intellectuality on the part of the intended bride'. In 1885 she married Teddy Wharton, an upper-class Bostonian, who was not, as he wrote, on Edith's 'plain [sic] of thought'. Wharton's fiction gives an eloquent account of the boredom, claustrophobia and physical repulsion to be found in an uncongenial marriage. The Wharton family had a history of mental instability: after speculating disastrously with his wife's money (and installing a mistress with some of it), Teddy collapsed with drink and depression.

Edith found herself "tied to a crazy person", as one catty friend put it, "who is only just sane enough not to be locked up, but too crazy to be out". She divorced him in 1913. Edith too had been unfaithful. In 1907, in the sort of Paris salon at which poor Teddy felt so out of place, she met Morton Fullerton – a smooth American whose wardrobe contained 'a great number of "plastrons" '(detachable dress-shirt-fronts).

He was charming but deeply unreliable; he had a potentially scandalous homosexual past, a wife he had divorced with alarming alacrity, and was running both a blackmailing mistress and a quasi-incestuous relationship with a cousin brought up as his sister. Perhaps as readers we should be grateful to the cad. Their brief affair taught her 'what happy women must feel', and the subsequent pain and humiliation fed into her writing. Hermione Lee deals superbly with the many strands of Wharton's life.

Her biography is not strictly chronological, but pulls out various threads (friendship with James; tours in Italy; social life in Paris; houses and gardens – Wharton was a passionate and knowledgeable gardener; war-work; marriage) in different chapters. Lee is particularly masterful in her discussion of Wharton's fiction. Many biographies of novelists sink under the leaden weight of resumé; but Lee's outlines of the plots are fused with illuminating interpretation.

A magnificent and subtle biography of a magnificent and subtle writer.